Many of you have no doubt been following with interest the case—widely being reported in the news media—of Youcef Nadarkhani, an Iranian Christian Pastor who has been found guilty of apostasy by the regime’s courts and is facing execution because he has refused to recant his faith.

We are pleased to share with you a statement released yesterday, October 4, by the Bahá'í International Community decrying Pastor Nadarkhani’s sentencing and calling for his immediate release.

We hope its wide dissemination will prompt local Assemblies, groups, and individual believers who have developed friendships with churches and with interfaith organizations in their localities to share the statement with them. If yours was one of the Assemblies assigned the task of contacting your senators and congressional representative, we encourage you to share the statement with the staff your efforts have so far put you in touch with.

We likewise hope Bahá'í Campus Associations will take steps to share the statement with faith-based and other clubs with a special interest in human rights on the campuses of their respective colleges and universities. Bahá'í Public Information Officers are strongly encouraged to share the statement with their media contacts. The power of the statement will be much enhanced if reporters can relate it to an individual in their community who has suffered religious persecution. We recommend you suggest this to them.

In a well-known passage from His writings, the Blessed Beauty advises us:“Be as a lamp unto them that walk in darkness, a joy to the sorrowful, a sea for the thirsty, a haven for the distressed, an upholder and defender of the victim of oppression.”

Your efforts to uphold the human rights of the many victims of the Iranian regime’s relentless campaign of hatred—not least of them our beleaguered Bahá'í sisters and brothers—continue to awaken admiration and pride in our hearts. Let us press on until they can enjoy the same precious freedoms we all too often take for granted.

We join with the global chorus of condemnation protesting the sentencing of Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, and calling for his release.

For a court of law to rule against someone from Muslim ancestry who has freely chosen to be a Christian is yet another instance of the brutality being meted out by the Iranian authorities on their own people.

The recent public proclamation reporting that the charges against Pastor Nadarkhani have been changed – as a result of the global outcry at his conviction – only further exposes the arbitrary nature of decisions made by the judiciary system of Iran and the transparent injustice of the situation.

The sentence he faces is not only reprehensible; it is a violation of every legal, moral, spiritual and humanitarian standard.

Which temporal government in the world can reasonably decide it has the power to curtail freedom of belief? Belief is not something that can be taken away or bartered; it is a matter of conviction, of the heart, the mind and the soul, beyond the realm of any government's control.

The Baha'i community understands well the challenging circumstances facing minorities living in Iran today. And now it is evident that those minorities which are nominally recognized by the state are as equally subordinate to the majority as those who have no rights.

There is little need to rehearse here the endless list of executions, torture, imprisonments, privations and other afflictions that are being meted out on the sorely-tried people of Iran.

Everything that country's representatives profess on the world stage is contradicted by their treatment of their own people at home. Yet, its officials travel freely to other nations where they are offered a platform from which to broadcast their untruths, denying the callous treatment of their own citizens while displaying pretensions of good will for the people of the world.

There is much to be done to alert the people of the world to the hypocrisy of a government which is widely and continually oppressing its people.

There is much to be done for humanity to be alerted to what is going on inside Iran and to be awakened to the appalling memory of what can occur when we fail to act against state-sponsored campaigns of hatred.